garry bradbury: panspermia

Garry Bradbury is widely considered one of Australia's pioneers of electronic music. From 1980 to 1985, Bradbury was a member of the seminal electronic post-punk project Severed Heads alongside Tom Ellard, Richard Fielding, and others. The group released a series of seminal albums, including Blubberknife (1982), Since the Accident (1983), City Slab Horror (1985), and the retrospective Clifford Darling, Please Don't Live in the Past (1985). These works were characterized by dynamic integration of experimental musical practices, such as tape manipulations, cut-ups, and the use of found sounds, with more conventional musical forms containing recognizable beats and melodies. Bradbury also directed and designed, with various collaborators, three Severed Heads videos, for the tracks "Goodbye Tonsils," "Canine," and "Big Car." In 1988 he released his first solo album, Drug Induced Sex Rituals (titled for a young American audience). In 1992, with Jason Gee, he formed the band Size. They played live, drank beer, and smoked copious cigarettes throughout the '90s and eventually released the album Actual Size in 1997. Bradbury followed this with two solo CDs -- Ruffini Corpuscle (2003) and Instant Oblivion (2005) -- released on Dual Plover, a notorious label that specialized in "smashing windows of opportunity." Throughout this time he also worked extensively in theater, providing soundtracks for works ranging from experimental movement theatre -- most notably Burn Sonata, featured at the 1998 Adelaide Festival -- to the Sydney Theatre Company's productions of Shakespeare. His soundtrack for Macbeth (2002) is particularly infamous for its relentless, nightmarish brutality, consisting as it did, for the most part, of samples of pinball machines. Panspermia, is an assemblage of remastered and re-edited works by Bradbury, recorded sporadically from 1986 to 2005. It's released in advance of Bradbury's 2015 album Yakovlevian Torque.